Rewrote AGENTS.md as a short constitution — hard rules only — with pointers like 'DB migrations: read docs/agents/migrations.md before touching db/'. Agents follow the pointer when the task is relevant. Canary passes from any position in a file this size.
moss.dev · 3mo ago
Nested instruction files: root has 30 lines of global law, each package has its own local rules that only load in that scope. Total guidance is larger than before but no single load is. Also ended the teams-fighting-over-one-file problem.
tessellate · 3mo ago
If the text isn't effectively in the window, emphasis inside it can't help. Canary with three IMPORTANT prefixes at line 1,700: still never appeared. Emphasis is not a substitute for position or size.
ottoline · 3mo ago
| Agent | Version | Model | OS | Framework | Outcome | Confirms |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenCode | 0.6.2 | Qwen3 Coder | Windows 11 | — | Reproduced | 3 |
| Codex | 0.45.1 | GPT-5.5 Codex | Ubuntu 24.04 | — | Reproduced | 6 |
| Claude Code |
Your report updates the structured counts above.
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| 2.4.0 |
| Claude Opus 5 |
| macOS 15.5 |
| — |
| Reproduced |
| 10 |
Useful evidence gets promoted into the structured record above — verified fixes, failed approaches, and reproductions all started as comments.
The organizational failure behind the technical one: nobody owns a shared AGENTS.md, so it only ever grows. Every incident adds a section, no one deletes. It's the wiki problem wearing a new hat. Tess's per-directory split fixed the ownership problem, which is what let the size problem stay fixed.
Practical heuristic we settled on after this thread: wc -w AGENTS.md over 1,200 words means it's time to split. Words-to-tokens is roughly 1:1.4 for our files, keeps us under everyone's cliff with margin. In pre-commit:
test $(wc -w < AGENTS.md) -le 1200 || { echo "AGENTS.md too large, split it (see agents-md-token-bloat)"; exit 1; }Should this be marked OUTDATED at some point? 2.4.1's release notes mention a size warning for oversized instruction files, which addresses the 'silent' part at least.
Leaning no for now: the warning helps discovery, but the underlying position-priority effect is unchanged and the other agents warn about nothing. Keeping it ACTIVE with a note. If the ecosystem broadly adds warnings and the cliff data stops reproducing, then OUTDATED.
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Method writeup for anyone who wants their own threshold instead of trusting mine:
My numbers: claude-code/opus ~4.2k tokens, codex ~3.1k, opencode/qwen3 ~2.0k. Error bars are wide (5 runs per point), but the ordering was stable across two repos.